Do the ancient Greeks still matter? Does it make a difference that they are no longer taught to high-school and college students? And who's to blame for the fact that they are not?
It is to answer such questions that the classicists Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath have produced Who Killed Homer? -- a book that indicts classics professors for the death of the subject they are paid to teach. Arguing that this death has important consequences for those outside the university, Who Killed Homer? should be read and pondered by everyone who cares about the health of our educational system.
In an early nineteenth-century sermon at Oxford, Thomas Gaisford recommended Greek on the grounds that "not only does it elevate one above the common herd, but it also leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument." No one today would recommend studying classics for the money. But until recently many students took up the subject both because of the light it throws on civilization and for certain habits of mind that it seemed especially able to confer. The study of Greek and Latin was regarded as the best training for a leading position in politics, finance, the military, or polite letters.
The preeminent position of the classics -- so obvious to Gaisford -- was not always secure. At the end of antiquity, many early Christians felt that Greek and Roman literature, bound up with pagan gods and moral values, should not be the basis for education in a Christian society. In the end, however, pagan literature was absorbed rather than rejected: Just as the children of Israel had "despoiled the Egyptians," taking what was valuable from their enemies, so Christians raided pagan culture.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the Battle of the Books pitted "the moderns" against "the ancients," the claim was made that the preeminence of the Greeks and Romans rested on mere social prejudice and that the vernacular literature of Europe provided a more modern basis for education. In the end, that claim too was accepted only in part: The newer studies were recognized, but the value of the old was affirmed.
When the rise of science challenged the place of humanistic studies in the later nineteenth century, educators felt compelled to admit that Greek and Latin did not deserve to be the whole of education. They still, however, maintained pride of place within the humanities: Entrance and graduation requirements in Latin continued to be enforced. When these were removed in the twentieth century, classics nonetheless enjoyed a high prestige, the inherent interest of its subject matter being reinforced by the fact that Latin and Greek seem to improve performance on standardized tests (classics majors in the 1970s had the highest GRE scores in the humanities, scoring on average fifty points higher than English majors). Through the 1980s, classics departments were also a haven for students who loved literature but disliked the "hermeneutic of suspicion" and other deconstructionist lunacies perpetrated over the last twenty years in English and modern-language departments.
Until recently, a classics major was still regarded as an excellent preparation for a wide variety of careers. It provides, for example, linguistic training. Learning to translate languages quite different from our own brings a rapid gain in sophistication about language. Greek and Latin are concrete languages and thus teach the "cash value" of an English sentence: "His failure produced in him a feeling of depression" would be expressed in Latin or Greek as: "Not having gained what he wanted, he was dispirited" -- a way of speaking in which human agents, not abstract nouns, are the subjects of sentences. So too, studying the classics provides a unique intellectual content. Most of the West's great ideas occurred first and most forcibly to the Greeks -- in politics, philosophy, historiography, rhetoric, imaginative literature, and science.
But in recent years the number of undergraduates majoring in classics has radically declined: Of the over one million bachelor-of-arts degrees awarded by American universities in 1994, only six hundred were in classics. Hanson and Heath argue that this is so because the classics professors who ought to be defending and promoting their discipline have failed to do so. The vast increase in classical scholarship (over sixteen thousand books and articles a year, according to the most recent bibliographical survey) masks an ailing profession.
The causes for this malady, Hanson and Heath believe, are many. There is the fact that the modern research university doesn't value teaching. Though there are classicists who devote substantial energy to their students, the American university system rewards publication rather than teaching -- and part of the reward is a reduction in teaching. Teachers feel they must publish, and those who can't say much that is both new and true are tempted to make their mark with faddish topics and silly trendiness -- writing endless articles with titles like "Gendering the Body in Sappho and Theognis" or "Homoerotic Rhetoric in Aristophanes."
Some scholars, like avant-garde artists out to shock, attack their own subject -- declaring the Greeks the fountainhead of racism and sexism and damning the whole classical inheritance. It is a sort of vandalism, like burning a Stradivarius violin to make a momentary blaze.
And yet, even more traditional philologists and historians are not to be excused for the death of classics. They are guilty of over-specialization, an unwillingness to address large questions, the habit of writing exclusively for specialists, and the reluctance to explain why their subject matters.
"Why," as Hanson and Heath ask, "do so few professors of Greek and Latin teach us that our present Western notions of constitutional government, free speech, individual rights, civilian control over the military, separation between religious and political authority, middle-class egalitarianism, private property, and free scientific inquiry both are vital to our present existence and derive from the ancient Greeks?"
Who Killed Homer? is a call to recover the sense of what is valuable. It is full of moral indignation, occasionally naming names. It rips at the mad follies of academia in general, but saves its harshest words for classicists themselves.
The authors, however, are not mere scolds. The chapter "Thinking Like a Greek" demands that professors teach the concrete realities of Greek and Roman history and society that are frequently ignored by literary classicists. Greco-Roman antiquity was not multicultural, but it was multiracial, and we owe to the Greeks the idea that it is the adoption of Greek culture, not the possession of Greek genes, that makes the Greek.
The authors of Who Killed Homer? tend to denigrate specialized scholarship and regard as obscurantist any work not addressed to the general reader. This is too bad, because one of the strengths of classics is traditional philology -- scientific, based upon empirical fact and rigorous argument, and the opposite of deconstructionist relativism. Hanson and Heath also launch a tirade against foreign (especially British) scholars who take positions in America, and such xenophobia, besides being ugly, is unrelated to the principal points they make.
The specific proposals in Who Killed Homer? are intended to redress the balance between scholarship and teaching. Many of these are utopian -- requiring an impossible degree of unanimity over the whole academy -- or possibly harmful. The book, for example, recommends abolishing the doctoral dissertation in favor of five or six small papers that would remain unpublished, giving young scholars a wider breadth of focus. It also urges getting rid of tenure in favor of five-year contracts, despite the likelihood that administrative bean-counters will use enrollment figures, which for Greek and Latin are never very high, to abolish whole programs.
But some of the proposals from Hanson and Heath make good sense, if the world could be made to see it. They recommend ending the exploitation of graduate teaching assistants and of part-time adjuncts (teachers with no permanent position, paid a much lower salary). And they urge a limit on the number of publications that can be submitted for review at promotion time, which emphasizes quality rather than quantity.
Hanson and Heath are in the end pessimistic about the possibility of saving their discipline; they think it likely that classics in the academy will die and that "the recovery of Greek wisdom" will take place elsewhere. But if the classics survive, it will be in part thanks to such books as Who Killed Homer? -- which describes so plainly and clearly what has gone wrong.
David Kovacs is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. The third volume of his edition of Euripides will appear this fall from the Loeb Classical Library.